Description

** If Emacs segfaults try changing font size. This is going to be fixed. **

** If you have troubles pressing keys like Ctrl-Space install Hacker's Keyboard **

Runs on modified version of Terminal Emulator - requires hardware keyboard and a rather big display.

Includes Busybox and eshell. SSH (for TRAMP) and git are planned.

Source code: https://github.com/zielmicha/emacs-android

My review

Review from

Reviews

2.8

398 total

5 105

4 56

3 42

2 35

1 160

David Eddyshaw

Just run it under Android Terminal or BetterTerminal Emulator The sole problem with this is the flaky terminal emulator it's bundled with. The emacs.bin binary from inside the installed app runs fine under better emulators if you put it in the relevant PATH and give it the right permissions; you can put an .emacs in wherever ~ is for that terminal emulator. The emacs.bin will look for its files in /sdcard/emacs. After you've let this app download all the emacs components you can then just uninstall it, and the emacs.bin binary will work just fine. Obviously you need root and a decent file explorer but if you're the sort of person who wants to run emacs on Android that's probably a given ...

A Google User

Fixing keys and fonts on Asus Transformer TF700T Amazing! Thanks a lot - with emacs (erc, org-mode, etc) my android is complete! Workaround to use hardware keyboard and larger font size on Asus Transformer (Tried on TF700T Android 4.1.1): 1. Install Android Terminal Emulator from play 2. Install Emacs 3. Start and quit emacs 4. chmod -R 777 /data/data/com.zielm.emacs # or you can chown to the other terminal user 5. /data/data/com.zielm.emacs/init.sh Keys work. Remember to change the back key to esc in terminal preferences, remap ALT and chose a color theme! Use M-x for Ctrl-space (this won't work). I hope the author will also fork a newer Terminal.

A Google User

Thank-You! Can't wait for a few fixes though! I've been checking back regularly in the play store for emacs. I figured there had to be a true-believer out there somewhere who was working on this! I have a Targus bluetooth keyboard on a galaxy tab 2 10.1, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to get the CTRL key to work. It works in my other apps, but not in emacs. What's the trick? I can use ESC-X to get meta-x behavior, but without ctrl-x I'm sort fo stuck...

Daehee Jeong

Great work! The app works great on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, and the apple bluetooth keyboard also works flawlessly with the "External keyboard helper pro". One problem is that I cannot write or display "Korean". I tried to change the fontsets but it didn't work. I wish that the developer can upgrade the app so that we can use international languages. Without this, the app works great and I love it!

Jordan Pavlov

Updated August 23, 2012 No, does not work. I would be interested to see how you can use a keyboad based editor on Android. But it looks like it was just a port from the original. The GitHub was updated last 3 years ago so cya.

Triston J. Taylor

Poor Implementation I don't like the app's disposition to control screen orientation. What the app 'thinks' is not important to me. The installer failed with 6 errors and no method to remedy. Restarting the app does not solve the problem. There is no option in settings to download either [should be the standard not the exception].

User reviews

David Eddyshaw July 21, 2014

Just run it under Android Terminal or BetterTerminal Emulator The sole problem with this is the flaky terminal emulator it's bundled with. The emacs.bin binary from inside the installed app runs fine under better emulators if you put it in the relevant PATH and give it the right permissions; you can put an .emacs in wherever ~ is for that terminal emulator. The emacs.bin will look for its files in /sdcard/emacs. After you've let this app download all the emacs components you can then just uninstall it, and the emacs.bin binary will work just fine. Obviously you need root and a decent file explorer but if you're the sort of person who wants to run emacs on Android that's probably a given ...

Thank-You! Can't wait for a few fixes though! I've been checking back regularly in the play store for emacs. I figured there had to be a true-believer out there somewhere who was working on this! I have a Targus bluetooth keyboard on a galaxy tab 2 10.1, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to get the CTRL key to work. It works in my other apps, but not in emacs. What's the trick? I can use ESC-X to get meta-x behavior, but without ctrl-x I'm sort fo stuck...

Great work! The app works great on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, and the apple bluetooth keyboard also works flawlessly with the "External keyboard helper pro". One problem is that I cannot write or display "Korean". I tried to change the fontsets but it didn't work. I wish that the developer can upgrade the app so that we can use international languages. Without this, the app works great and I love it!

Updated August 23, 2012 No, does not work. I would be interested to see how you can use a keyboad based editor on Android. But it looks like it was just a port from the original. The GitHub was updated last 3 years ago so cya.

Poor Implementation I don't like the app's disposition to control screen orientation. What the app 'thinks' is not important to me. The installer failed with 6 errors and no method to remedy. Restarting the app does not solve the problem. There is no option in settings to download either [should be the standard not the exception].

Useless without non-alphanumeric chars Unfortunately I can't use the / character with the hardware keyboard on my ASUS Transformer Pad TF300T, so it's kind of useless (couldn't type in file path). However, please keep working on it! I appreciate the effort :D

Crashes by default The default configuration results in emacs crashing (segfault) on small devices. Please add the "-nw" flag by default, or fix the defaults baked into the emacs binary. Emacs also crashes if the Hacker's Keyboard takes up less than 45% of the screen in landscape mode. Samsung Galaxy S III

Fantastic work, needs a few fixes Amazing work. I've been looking for this for a long time. Right now, the following keys don't work on the TF201: <>?:"{}|_+-=[]\;',./ (basically all the non-alphanumeric keys). I'd love to see the ability to put in your own startup file! Or maybe even just startup file edits. If you need help testing, feel free to contact me at tigerhawkvok@gmail.com, and I'll be happy to give you input from my TF201. [Edit] Problem persists as of 2013-01-06

Would love to see this working Segfault on install. Can't use the - key on a Logitech BT keyboard, so I can't try -nw option. Still, very exciting! Update: some font size changes don't help, but 8pt seems to fix the crash on startup.

Almost great I have been wanting this to work for a long time. Unfortunately its not quite usable on my Transformer Prime. It doesn't recognize any non-alpha numeric keys on the hardware keyboard. Kind of a problem if I can't hit /. Can't blame this on the Terminal it uses either, because the standalone Terminal works fine.

Lame emacs Sort of lame emacs: can't find a configuration that works with my kensington bt kb on a samsung galaxy tab 10.1. Can't read or write files to a directory other that the default, which has no access from other applications... But works and that's a great starting point

Promising This seems to work on a Samsung tablet with a Rapoo hardware keyboard, however every letter, number and symbol pressed appears on the screen twice, except Enter. Different terminal settings don't help out. Is there a known solution for this?

Amazing Work Thank You!!!. I was looking for a port forever. Was even getting scared that I might have to do it myself as cross compiling emacs was very problematic. This is a great start, a bit glitchy but has potential. Thank You!!! EMACS > VI :D

Crashes on Nexus 5 It seems I encountered the same issue when installing and ran the app immediately which resulted in a segfault. I didn t even try to set an alias for it in my .bashrc. Looking forward for seeing this at work.

Touchpad really craps up if I get emacs to work. On an Archos 101 G9 emacs did not startup because of missing charsets in /sdcard/emacs/etc, I copied /mnt/scard/emacs to /sdcard/emacs and then emacs started up. Since I copied the files the launcher started to crash frequently and all the other apps started to crash frequently and removind /sdcard/emacs entirely stopped the problem. I wish I could make a symbolic link from /sdcard to /mnt/sdcard emacs, unfotunatly there is no way to do that from terminal [free on android market], it says permission denied. Overall, I wish I was an emacs power user!!! Great start.

A good start, but still problematic. Let me first start by saying the effort to get a TTY-mode emacs running natively under Android, in a dedicated terminal app, is significant, and well worthwhile. That said, the limitations currently keep me from using it. 1. Does not support portrait mode, which is a must if you are going to use Hacker's Keyboard rather than a hardware keyboard. 2. Does not work with (all) BT keyboards. This is understandable -- even ConnectBot doesn't (though VXConnectBot does). 3. Does not support 256 colors, so emacs color themes don't work. 4. The issue with segfaults on startup with some font sizes. All that said, I think this app has a lot of promise, and I'll keep watching it to see if it becomes usable for me.

Good effort, problems with control key Good job! I appropriate your effort! However, using hardware keyboards, the control key doesn't work. I have the Hacker's keyboard, but it is hard to use my Nexus 7 for any serious work without a physical keyboard.

Thank you! Except for the crashes at startup with font sizes above 7 points (quite usable on my 720p 4.7" screen, though, at ~160 characters width :-), locked horizontal mode, and a strange issue with CTRL-g, which only seems to work once (ESC ESC ESC is OK), this is fantastic! The keyboard issues others have mentioned disappear when I use "External Keyboard Helper Pro". Non-alphanumeric keys, CTRL, ALT and function keys all seem to be fine (perixx PERIBOARD-804). I also have no trouble reading or writing files outside the default directory, as someone mentioned.

Nice progress toward a worthy goal On my SIII I got the segfault on initial startup too, but then emacs -nw started it up OK. Not ready for prime time, but basically worked, and I look forward to future progress. I mean, Emacs on my phone!

No matter I only get Segfaults all the time :'( The possibility of having Emacs running on my phone already blown my mind! Note: the font size thing does not work here no matter which font size I choose.

Broken terminal, but runs perfectly under terminal-ide This Emacs port is fine, but the author has bundled it with a broken terminal environment, hence all the segfaults. I tried running it under terminal-ide on my N7 with a BT keyboard, and it seemed to perform perfectly.

Needs work. For now, don't bother unless Unless you're a serious emacs/android/linux hacker who has time and energy to fix the issues/bugs.. SKIP THIS. I'm a longtime Linux/Emacs guy... So reading comments here, I got past the segfault via the cd src; ./b* method... But then my BT keyboard doesn't match up, for some important standard keys like: / , . And the dired (Ctrl-x d) doesn't work, and ... In principal, none of this should be too hard, Android is after all running on top of Linux, so it should be possible to run emacs via a terminal (VT100 or xterm) emulator login session, in character mode (emacs -nw) -- but this ain't that, not quite... PLEASE FIX!

Amazing job To all the nay-sayers: This *can* work! To get characters such as ~ working, fix segfaulting, and get more than 8 colors (sheesh, welcome to the 21st century!): as others have noted, the bundled terminal em. is broken and needs to be replace. Install the Android Terminal Emulator from the play store, start it, cd to /data/data/com.zielm.emacs and make these mods to initbb.sh: change the export TERM line to be export TERM=xterm-256color then change the emacs line to be emacs.bin. Next, get an xterm-256color file from another machine and put it into /sdcard/emacs/terminfo/x. Start by running initbb.sh from the commandline. (Put your .emacs into /sdcard/emacs.) Using a TF101 I needed to change the term. emulator so that the Alt key sends Esc, but now Meta works and all the problem characters type fine (function keys don't work yet).

A good start Excellent, it's mobile Emacs with Org-mode, etc. However, there are some important bugs to be fixed, so that for example portrait mode, Dired, buffer resizing can start working. On special characters, etc. there are solutions as Wikipedia's Org-mode article says on this Android port: "Initial version, most Ctrl, etc. key bindings work with Hacker's Keyboard app, or a hardware keyboard and External Keyboard Helper Pro app. Customizable with the /sdcard/emacs/.emacs init file. A large display is recommended."

Segfaults Sadly, this segfaults pretty reliably for me (on Samsung Galaxy Nexus, with a small screen so maybe that's the problem). Android version 4.1.1 if that helps. I'd really like to have this so would be willing to help find the problem, but I don't know much about Android development.